"He's going to want the boy dead," Delgado whispered. "The scout. Sutter. That's the whole of it, whatever he says in town. Long as that boy breathes, there's a witness. I wasn't to— I never agreed to that part. I want that said. I never agreed to any killing of a sick man in a barn."
"Then say it tomorrow," Caleb said. "To the chief. All of it."
He turned to the waiting riders and spoke through Tomás, slowly, so no word could wander. "Tell Chief Makya: the prisoner eats and drinks at my table's end tonight, and sleeps tied in my barn where my hand can guard him, and at first light the chief may question him with me standing by. No Kahlin hand takes him from this ground. That is my word, and my word is the gate here."
The riders listened, nodded once in the firelight, and swung up. Behind Caleb, Delgado made a small sound. "You just bought me with a promise, Rourke."
"No," Caleb said. "I lent you the night. What you buy with it is your affair."
Chapter 8 — What Asto Saw
They moved Asto into the house on the fourth morning, because Sadie said the barn dust was bad for a healing wound. He lay on a cot in the room off the kitchen with the window open to the tanks, and from there he could hear the camp sounds of his own people — a baby crying, horses stamping, his mother Sihas laughing once at something — and it steadied him more than medicine.
He told it that evening. All of it, in order, the way Makya had taught him a scout renders a report: what the eyes saw first, and no embroidery. Caleb sat at the kitchen table with his hands around a cup he never drank from. Makya sat straight as a lance shaft by the door. Tomás rendered the Kahlin words into English where Asto's own English thinned, and Sadie missed nothing; Asto could see her filing it like cartridges in a belt.
"Two mornings before I came to your trough," Asto began, "the wind was from the west and I was scouting the Box Canyon road, because game moves through there after rain. I heard the shots before I reached the rim."
He let his mind go back, and the room fell away, and he was on the rim rock again in the bright morning, belly-down behind a boulder, looking into the teeth of it.
The paymaster's escort had come down the canyon in good order and died in bad ground. Six troopers, a sergeant, the paymaster himself with the strongbox chained in a covered wagon, riding into a place where the walls leaned close and the road had only one way out the far side. The first volley came from above on both rims at once, which meant the ambush had been laid by men who knew the escort's schedule and its route. It was over in the time a man takes to smoke half a cigarette. The troopers who lived longest were the ones who got under the wagon. It did not save them.
Then the canyon quieted, and the killers came down off the rocks like men going to familiar work.
"White men," Asto said. "Six. Maybe seven. Not soldiers — no two dressed alike. They moved the wagon to the canyon's mouth where the ground is soft. They took the strongbox down and they did not open it there. They dug." He opened his eyes. "By the mouth of the canyon where a big stone stands like a tooth, they dug a hole and put the box in, and over it they set three flat stones, one on another, the way a man marks a place he means to come back to. Not a grave. A marker."
"How do you know they meant to come back for it?" Caleb asked.
"Because the tall one laughed about the paymaster's seal," Asto said. "He said, 'Let the Army keep looking for its money in Apache camps.' He said they would fetch it when the ground cooled. And because of his hat." Here Asto's voice changed, hardened. "The tall one led them. He gave the orders before the shooting and after it. On his hat was a band of silver — conchos, round, bright as fish scales. I know that hatband. All the country knows it. Abel Sutter wears silver on his hat like a peacock wears its tail."
The kitchen was very quiet. Makya's face might have been carved.
"Then they saw me," Asto said. "A stone slipped under my knee on the rim — a small thing. The tall one looked up and I saw his face clear, and I ran."
He ran the way a scout runs, downhill and mean, using the draws. They had horses staged below the rim — men who plan an ambush plan the chase too — and the first shot took him along the left ribs as he crossed an open flat, a burning graze that knocked the wind out of him but not the stride. He made the rocks. In the rocks one of them came at him with a knife, a thick man, and got the forearm Asto threw up to guard his throat; Asto put his own knife into the man's leg and heard him scream, and ran on with his blood running down into his hand. By dark he had lost them among the boulders, and by the second day his horse was dead of a stray ball, and he was walking, and the thirst had begun its slow work of unmaking him — until dusk, and the smell of water, and a white man's trough, and a white man's hand lifting his head.
"When they finished the burying, before they rode out, I heard one more thing," Asto said. "The thick man — the one whose leg I cut — asked when they would move the box. And the tall one, Sutter, said: 'When the soldiers are done hunting Indians. A few nights. Nobody digs where an ambush happened while the ground's still warm.'"